G20 in Toronto 2010

Alright people! Welcome to The Infection…We’re back! After a long and harrowing weekend in Toronto this weekend at the G20 summit I, Poison Apple, have returned with some pictures and an epic tale for you. No romance in this tale, just action and suspense to be enriched, enlightened and entertained with! Here it is!

Alright, so before I get into the gruesome details of the event I want to thank some friends of mine over at the Sikh Activist Network who went with me. They had my back all weekend and trust me…Toronto was not the city to be walking around alone in. For the first time in my life I had gone to Toronto to be more afraid of the police than of the thugs and other vagrants in the city. To be clear…the entire downtown core had become a police state, they might as well have declared martial law and arrested anybody they just didn’t like for the sake of doing so. Now onto the story!

So the weekend began on Saturday with myself and my associates arriving in Toronto at Queens park. There is where a huge protest was organized and there were many groups all shouting out for different causes there. This march was, as far as I could see, peaceful. We walked Southbound down University avenue and minor a few roadblocks we were fine. We were then diverted off University onto Queen street going west. If you’re not familiar with Toronto the please follow my account of things using mapquest of google maps.

The march down UniversityRoadblock at the American embassyRoadblock before Queen street

After being diverted onto Queen Street the march continued. The usual protester chants could be heard as we took over the street. The police were quite decent and they escorted us down the street making sure that no unnecessary chaos unfolded as we made our advance to Spadina. It was at Spadina where we were blocked again by the police going South on Spadina…at this point even I’m starting to get a bit irate. I’ve been marching for a good while now yet we have not been able to even come within three blocks of our BILLION DOLLAR WALL. We were sent North back up to College street where we then went East back to Queens park.

Spadina and QueenComing up Queen to hit Spadina

After going back to Queens Park, my assiociates and myself saw nothing really worth documenting anymore. Most of the protesters had begun to make speeches and we were getting hungry…so we headed off for lunch. During our lunchbreak is where we started to hear some interesting things like…police cars being burnt up and other violent acts being comitted going east on Queen street. This is where things got heated.

So we had eaten well and found some actual violence which was a bit of a shock and a disappointment to us. We didn’t expect people to be this ‘passionate’ about their causes but some are more extreme than others. We continued to walk, following the trail of destruction to where we found ourselves in a crowd advancing south down Yonge street to where they were stopped by police in full riot gear at King street.

The People versus The PoliceDear officer: If you want her number that badly, you're gonna have to ask nicelyYou're sexy, you're cute, take off your riot suit!

Once I had gotten my pictures, we left that scene. Interesting as it was to be there, once we see guns and such coming out we have no business there…not at the front at least. Getting shot may seem cool in movies but in real life that shit hurts! We went back and walked around for a bit trying to see if our small group could get close to the wall. We managed to succeed and learned that it was the large groups of protesters that weren’t allowed near the wall. So finally, we got to touch the wall that had cost the taxpayers a billion dollars of their money.

So…the picture above is the so-called security wall. Now, knowing that we payed over 1 billion dollars for this wall and all the security…I would have expected the great wall of China. Yet…we get some dopey looking wall with a bunch of cops that aren’t even in riot gear just standing there. What the fuck…

After seeing our shitty wall we moved on back up to Queen and Spadina where things got ‘lively’. Some extremists had managed to fuck up two cars. One was burnt out while the other was a police cruiser that was on fire.

Obviously, by this point in the day the police are less than leniant with us (the protesters/public) we’ve managed to burn their cars, assault them in some cases, destroy property and overall break the law in front of them. They had good reason to be angry in all fairness. The first day ended for us when they ran us (the crowd) down and squeezed us off of Queen Street forcing us to disperse.

Now, there’s much more story here to tell but you all are going to have to visit us on Facebook for more stories if you want to talk to us personally. Also, for the people who did spot us there on day 2…I am an idiot since I forgot the memory card for my camera thus all my shots and the risks I took to get said shots are all a memory now. I apologize to you all.